Weeds Are the Answer to Your Garden Problems

Weeds are the solution, not the problem…Thank you Brooklyn Bedding for sponsoring! Visit http://brooklynbedding.com/anneofalltrades to get 25% off your mattress with code anneofalltrades

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0:00 Intro
0:57 Weeds 101
2:40 Putting weeds into action
4:41 300 years of seeds
7:02 Don’t eliminate, Replace
10:15 a word from our sponsor
13:06 Dandelions
14:41 Creating weed fertilizer
19:49 Cover up mother nature!
21:44 Chickweed
22:24 Clover
22:48 Plantain
23:26 Purslane
23:58 Bindweed
24:20 Thistle
24:37 Grass weeds
25:39 Resist the HOA!

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I’m Anne of All Trades. In NASHVILLE, I have a woodworking, blacksmithing and fabrication shop, a selection of furry friends, and an organic farm. Whether you’ve got the knowledge, tools, time or space to do the things you’ve always wanted to do, everything is “figureoutable.”

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as gardeners we are taught from the very beginning to fight the very thing that actually has the power to solve all of our food growing problems weeds weeds are not the problem every Gardener has been taught to believe they are they’re actually the solution to every problem we Face they’re the answer not the [Music] enemy 2 months ago this was completely bare soil I brought my pigs in here for 6 months to make me a pond and they did a great job but they left an absolute Barren Wasteland in their weight I have not put a single seed in here and somehow just 2 months later we’ve got ourselves a jungle again and the real question is where did those seeds come from why are some plants growing in some places and not others and what job are these weeds actually trying to do as Mother Nature fixes herself oh it sucks getting old when our ancestors started farming which is a fancy way of saying that they decided to start intentionally cultivating the most delicious weeds in one place so that More Humans could have access to them without having to go out and forage for them they also figured out that plowing the soil would artificially create a bunch of necessary conditions for plants to thrive and it worked great at least for a while but the problem is when we as humans disrupt Mother Nature’s Way of naturally taking care of herself all of a sudden the entire burden of taking care of everything falls on us plowing makes light fluffy soil that is water permeable a nice spot for seeds to germinate and have space for the roots to spread out it initially eliminates all of the weeds and other things that the farmer didn’t want to grow in that area that might compete with the plants they wanted to grow for sunlight if we’re going to plow the soil we then need to figure out a way to cover it back up otherwise all of the water will evaporate from that dark surface when we no longer have different heights of plants shading the soil differently when we no longer have different species of plants that are taking up different nutrients and minerals and all those things then dropping their foliage down onto the soil and adding it back into the soil all of a sudden the entire burden of fertility falls on us as Farmers as well though there are tons of different nutrients and minerals that plants actually need to survive someone really smart a while back figured out that if we basically had nitrogen phosphorus and potassium ium most plants could grow pretty okay so we started creating that artificially and adding it to the soil as well and that is where things really started to fall apart now that we understand weed Theory it’s time to actually put it into practice how do we read what the weeds are telling us how do we plant what we would prefer to plant in their place and how do we actually use the weeds that are present to create the fertilizer that’s going to fix our soil in the long term completely for free if you’ve been watching this channel for a while you know that when we started this whole Farm was compacted clay unplant soil and I fixed the soil here by observing what was going on in the forest and trying to copy it here at home and if you want to watch a whole video about that that involves a soil scientist coming to evaluate our farm showing how to test our soil and all those things click over here or one of these places over here and you can do that but here’s the thing even if you watch that video you probably know that from one square foot to the next our soil chemistry can totally change and instead of going through the trouble of doing a soil test we could actually just look down and see what the weeds are telling us as far as what the soil is deficient in what we could plant instead of the weeds that are present and also how we could use the weeds that are present to fix the soil and stop battling the same weeds year after year after year the alpaca shears are still broken so the sprinkler is still in full effect but actually look at this nature is taking back over where I used to have the chicken Coupe last spring what was once Barren Wasteland has now been replaced with a beautiful bed of ragweed poke weed and other detritus that why would we fight when we can just let it fallow and turn back into a luscious pasture whenever the weeds are done doing what weeds do hi Polly you handsome little boy soak it up every spring this entire area gets covered in an absolute blanket of chickweed most gardeners would look at that sea of chickweed and come to the conclusion that chickweed keeps growing here because there’s a ton of chickweed seeds in the soil here and they’re not wrong but what most people don’t know is that there aren’t just chickweed seeds there are 300 years worth of random seeds that are all in there that for whatever reason Mother Nature knows to tell which seeds to come up in which places at which time and then once they’ve done the job that they were put there to do in the first place they disappear and the next thing starts coming up so our job if we want to be good lazy gardeners is to stop looking at weeds like pests and start letting them teach us what they have to teach us so in that let’s take a quick look at the environment here that seems to be so dang perfect for chickweed this area right here is at the end of a sloped driveway you can actually see nature taking its course behind me here when it rains which it does quite a bit here all of the water is going to come off of the barn roll down the sidewalk and get trapped right here in this area chickweed loves to have wet feet it likes really really moist soil conditions chickweed also really likes excessive nitrogen because it is a plant that grows 100% on top of the soil and basically puts down no root structure my donkeys like to stand here every night and as they do that they leave all kinds of little nitrogen deposits that I can’t really keep up with with my rake and shovel and so as it happens all of the water running down the hill plus all of the nitrogen that the donkeys are constantly depositing is making a perfect environment for chickweed to totally Thrive you should wash your hands in preparation for this video I tried really hard to find a whole bunch of weeds in the garden but hilariously learning how to work with the weeds instead of work against them has worked so phenomenally well over the last 5 and a half years that I don’t actually have any weeds to show you so let’s hop back over into the New Garden space that is currently weed City oh my gosh strawberries so good H here is a real common enemy of people in our gardening zone the cocko bur this little jerk of a plant puts on little velcro seeds that stick to every single piece of fur and fluff and get transported all over the farm those same cocko birs also really like to get stuck in all of my animals fur and cause them all kinds of hot spots and sores and these things are basically the bane of my existence my dad has spent much of his last four years worth of visits trying to pull the cocko burs and trying to burn the fields which also nearly ended up in our neighbor losing their house last year thank God for fire blankets let’s just say that but I’ve been telling my dad for 5 years since we moved here that instead of battling the cocko bir by trying to get rid of them by pulling them and killing them and doing all these other things we should just figure out what the COO are telling us about the soil fix the soil and we probably won’t have to worry about them ever again cockers tend to show up in soil that has been Disturbed overg grazed has an extreme lack of soil fertility and also has a high moisture content which makes sense why half of our pasture over there is covered in cockers because this land was overgrazed for 20 years by all manner of different species there was multiple different Pond sites which now tend to accumulate a whole lot of rain water and yes after being highly Disturbed and overgrazed there is very little fertility in the soil over there current conventional farming methods would have you spray a broadleaf pesticide like gron on that entire field so that only grass would grow and that there wouldn’t be cocko birs present to compete with the native grasses but then all of the spent hay that we would use from a sprayed field would then poison half of our plants in our garden which you can actually see a bunch of YouTubers making videos about right now they use straw bells in their garden and now their beans tomatoes and other plants are totally ruined and let’s not just Breeze past the fact that salad is disgusting which is why we raise beef in the first place so that our beef can eat our salad on our behalf and turn it into a ribeye steak which is much more delicious do I want a ribeye steak that has been 100% grass-fed with poisoned grass absolutely not so my personal strategy when it comes to managing cockers in an organic and future thinking way is to come in and cut them right before they go to seed so that they have less plant material to actually turn into seeds then hilariously I also use the very thing that caused their appearance in the first place I overgrazed the areas that have cocko birs in them and then plant competing plants like Ry grass earlier in the season so that there’s competition for the seeds that are still in the soil absolutely there’s millions of them we’re not going to ever get rid of all those seeds just oh my gosh hold on let me go check something out in the BART really quick so thank you livestock Guardian dogs for alerting us to the fact that this little jerk Jeffrey has apparently just broken a hole in the fence and and come in to have himself a grand old time welcome to farm life anyway join me for a moment and I’ll show you the project I have actually been working on since Jeffrey’s last Breakin for the last year since the last entry of Jeffrey happened and I ended up having to sleep in the barn on a cot on the floor of my office for like a month and a half while I waited for goat babies to be born I decided to build this it’s not done yet so don’t fully judge it but this might just be my proudest thrifting opportunity yet Tada as most projects that I start do this got a little out of hand and what started as just needing a place to put my mattress expanded because I got a really good deal on some flooring remnants and I had some recycled paint and some other random stuff left over from our house remodel I had exactly enough Cherry left over to frame out the windows beautifully and now here we are with a haly loft that is now basically an apartment one thing that’s really important for me as we do any sort of advertising Integrations on this channel is talking about brands that we already use and love we’re not going to get paid just to like a product and then tell you to buy some random stuff and that was exactly what happened here with Brooklyn Bedding Adam and I’s bed up at the house is from Brooklyn Bedding and we absolutely love it so when it came time to pick the right mattress for this space the nicer that the space became the more that I realized I was probably going to spend more and more time up here and this would be a really sweet spot to have guests come and stay as well so I contacted Brooklyn Bing and I was like hey would you like to support our Channel and that is in fact how we ended up with this queen-size Sedona Elite one really unique thing about this space I could not in any world get a regular mattress that was already unfolded up and around the stairs here and so Brooklyn Bedding shipped me a smallish box with a little bit of help from Adam I was able to bring it upstairs set it in place and it was expanded and ready to use pretty quick so if you find yourself in need of a new bed check out Brooklyn bedding.com and if you use the code Ann ofal trades at checkout you’ll get a 25% discount which is significant and just to bring things full circle this formerly bed box is about to become a brand new garden bed okay back to the weeds what they can tell us and how we can use them to actually fix our soil this you might recognize as a dandelion dandelions are all over the place they tend to show up in super compacted soil think about the fact that water needs to be able to enter soil the tap roots of plants like dandelions and dock and things go really really deep to mine nutrients and bring them up to the soil surface in the form of plant matter like this one other unique thing about dandelion is that they indicate that right here in this spot not only is the soil compacted there’s also a lack of calcium so as lazy gardeners though dandelions are technically edible they’re disgusting we could probably pull this dandelion and plant something that looks like a dandelion and and then take the green matter of the danion that currently exists in this spot put it in some water to create some calcium rich fertilizer that we can then use to water whatever replacement plant we plant in this place which will ultimately fix the soil the way the dandelion was supposed to fix it and will keep further dandelions from showing up in its place in the future which ultimately accomplishes all of our goals we have a soil test yeah soil is compacted and needs calcium we have a fix for the soil and we also have a more delicious counterpart that we can plant in its place oh Mylanta what is that a fly no let’s show you how to put this in water can I help you like we’re creating fertilizer not giving donkey snacks but if you insist I will give you each one dandelion leaf for your pleasure and for the furtherance of my problems most likely all right all right all right okay so we’re taking the dandelion leaves that we’ve harvested which assuming that the tap root of the dandelion has done its job in bringing up the calcium that the presence of the dandelion has indicated is lacking in our soil we’re going to then come over here to our very handy dandy rainwater collection setup and we’re going to use rainwater to create some dangan sludge tea if you have a well or other natural water source you don’t have to use rainwater but the state of Tennessee is so lovely to massively over cinate our water and that tends to kill the beneficial microbes that grow in our soil so using tap water to create fertilizer is counterproductive here so we find creative ways to collect rain water to then create basically a poor man’s version of compost tea that we will cover let purify in the Sun and then we’ll ultimately use that in a diluted fashion to water our plants that we plant in the place of whatever weed we’re picking which then again hopefully will fix the soil in the way that it needed to be fixed and then those weed seeds that are definitely in the soil already will probably remain in the soil for the next 300 years but won’t reappear until another over compaction over grazing or extreme lack of calcium need necessitates their reappearance but here’s the thing those dandelions were not growing in a vacuum they were growing amongst a whole bunch of other weeds which probably indicate other lacks in the soil and other plants that we could plant in their place and some more weeds we could add to our concoction to make it a little bit more potent and ultimately a little more useful so let’s go do that by the way don’t mind the fact that I’m currently in the midst of constructing a new garden fence for our new garden and uh this is what that looks like right where we pulled the foliage from the dandelion plant we also have lady’s thumb which is an indicator of poor soil drainage an excessive amount of moisture and low soil fertility which then makes sense that we have other things like these little things which are in the lagum family which are nitrogen fixers AKA are going to increase the fertility of the soil and around them there’s all kinds of different grasses too that are also going to fix nitrogen and increase the F fertility and the drainage of the soil so if we instead of just making a tiny little microcosm of fertilizer for this one little space look at a slightly larger area of space and then include things like this Ragweed which increases organic Mass matter to the soil we’ll put that in there and basically just grab a whole bunch of handfuls of other things and put in the bucket as well and then we’ll come back in here and plant a whole bunch of things like the things that are already growing here so instead of a dandelion which has a deep Tap Root we could plant other things that have tap Roots like turnips instead of this Ragweed we can plant oh my gosh it’s already here wonder how that happened so something that’s in the same exact family but actually does something good for us which is amaranth not only does that provide a pop of color and gives us natural dyes for our plants it also creates an edible grain that we can dry out and use like we would any other cereal grain like oatmeal or grind it into flour and use that to make a tortilla and we’ll take all this stuff make it into a nice concoction let it purify for a while put some cardboard and some compost down and we’ll put all kinds of stuff that we do want in its place and then throughout the gardening season we will water the plants that we do want in this area with the fertilizer we’ve made from the plants we don’t want and yes there are thousands of different combinations of different weed fertilizers we can make for different purposes and different plants we can plant in the stead of the weeds that we don’t want but those need to be their very own videos but in the meantime I’m going to make this video really count and give you a very fast very quick list of a lot of the weeds that are most commonly found in most Gardens and what we as lazy gardeners can grow in their place to perhaps have a little more success with a little less Hands-On [Music] effort in case you didn’t catch this earlier the most important lesson from this video is that mother nature does not like to be naked so anytime we do anything to uncover her or reveal her more precious areas AKA soil we need to be absolutely certain to do everything in our power to as quickly as possible cover her back up because if we don’t cover her back up she’s going to cover herself back up and we’re probably not going to love as gardeners who want to grow vegetables not weeds the way she chooses to cover herself back up the best way to do that is this mulch also known as organic matter wood chips is decaying organic matter which then creates a growing medium AKA roots for other plants to grow and this is ultimately what we need another fun fact just because we’re here is that wood chips come from trees trees are basically giant straws that spend their entire lives sucking up moisture from their root system in the ground up into the leaves of the foliage above and then when the tree falls over and dieses and we chip it up because it’s in our way and whatever else those wood chips then become amazing little sponges that then soak up water as it falls from the sky in the form of rain and then hold it in place it keeps our soil from eroding it also acts like those little Ola pots that cost like $60 a piece to self waterer our garden for the a very very cheap price of for free but I digress I promised you a very quick list of common weeds what they tell us about our soil and how we can use those weeds to fix our soil and also what plants we can plant instead of those weeds if we don’t want those weeds here we go if like me you have an overabundance of chickweed in the early spring in Donkey poop ridden areas you can either pick that chickweed and use it as Greens in your salad if you want to make your salad more disgusting or you can take notice of the fact that chickweed really likes to grow in very moist nitrogen rich soil which is also a great place to plant buttercrunch lettuce which is delicious and delightful and doesn’t taste like a weed supposedly some people put chickweed into their smoothies as an anti-inflammatory and as a positive skin aid but that’s why I use beef Tallow as lotion and I don’t have to mess with drinking weeds if you happen to notice clover growing in your soil that is an indication that you have a nitrogen deficiency Clover is in the legume or the bean family so a great replacement crop is anything in the bean family anything that can take nitrogen somehow scientifically from the air and turn it into a nodule that then puts nitrogen directly into your soil what a wild world we live in if you happen to see plantain growing in your garden that is a great indication that you have very compacted soil that is also very much in need of some calcium and some potassium things that plantain will bring up from its root system and then deposit on the soil surface through its leaves a lot of people like to know where their plantain is growing so that in a pinch if they get stung by a bee or have a surprise wound happen they can grab the leaves of the plantain quickly chew them up and then spit them onto their sting or their wound and supposedly it creates some relief but also that seems like a lot of work I see gardeners fighting purc Lane all the time Pur Lane is a fantastic ground cover and also an indication that this is a great place for you to try to plant some cucumbers or other Vining plants that will grow across the soil because guess why Pur Lane shows up because you’ve left Mother Nature without her Underpants in public and she’s trying to cover herself up another great ground cover strawberries they grow all over the place and then you have the side effect of strawberries which are delicious delightful and who doesn’t want a strawberry I get tons of questions from folks battling bindweed and I used to have bindweed growing along my entire fence area here I let it do its thing and then shock of all shocks it resolved itself and I haven’t seen any s probably because I planted a whole bunch of pumpkins and watermelons in its place and they did what the bindweed was there to do in the first place this little seems to be a big weed contender in a lot of people’s Gardens and here’s the thing what looks exactly like thistle artichokes my third favorite food plant artichokes everywhere thistle grows and you’ll have artichokes instead of weeds here in Tennessee we are also constantly battling a sea of different grasses Nimble weed crack grass crab grass Bermuda grass all of the gross grasses that seem to just grow and spread no matter what we seem to do which is exactly why I have employed the use of cardboard and cover crops wherever I possibly can everywhere that I notice a blade of grass coming up I think about what I could possibly plant that will grow earlier in the season than that grass and then shade out that grass and stop it from being able to establish roots and spread further into my garden and where I can’t stop it from spreading further into my garden I work on adding fertility to the soil and then at the end of the day I go to bed and I sleep very well not just because I’ve moved a whole bunch of wheelbarrows worth of mulch but also because I did the best that I could and that is Buddy good enough we do not need our Gardens to look picture perfect I used to live in a place that had an HOA and all I had to do to get around the rules of the HOA was become the secretary of the HOA and delete all of the complaint emails before they actually could get to the rest of the board and I could actually get in trouble and then we move moved to the country which has worked out really really well for me I would absolutely love to spend a little bit more time going over some of the absolute nerdery that makes lazy gardening work and to that end a couple weeks ago I made a video touring the very Forest AKA my backyard that I modeled this Garden after that has ultimately produced thousands and thousands and thousands of pounds of produce without very much human intervention at all if you want to learn some of those same lessons from the forest as I did check out this video I will see you there cheers all right howdy I will give you a few snacks even though you probably don’t deserve them and well let’s be honest you do deserve them cuz you’re really cute come here buddy